Every day children are brought whom Russia tried to kill, Kyiv's Okhmatdyt Hospital doctor says
Ukraine’s national children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt, treated two young boys injured in Russia’s mass June 2 attack on Kyiv, including a 2-year-old, who may face permanent disability, a hospital doctor told hromadske.
Roman Zhezhera, head of the emergency surgery department and acting medical director of the National Children’s Hospital Okhmatdyt, said the boys were ages 2 and 4.
The older child “got off with a scare,” the doctor said, while the younger boy was much more seriously hurt.
“When there is a mass attack, it is stressful for adults, and for small children it is even more so,” Zhezhera said. “The boys arrived in shock, agitated. The older child did not have serious injuries, thank God, only a hematoma in the thigh area. The other child suffered much more because there was a comminuted fracture and damage to the elbow joint. He is in stable condition. Full treatment is now being carried out to restore the function of the limb. It is hard to say how much can be restored; with a high probability, he faces disability or the absence of full function in the limb.”
He said doctors at the hospital often see such injuries because Okhmatdyt takes in children not only from Kyiv but from across Ukraine.
“Every day, children are brought, whom the Russian Federation is killing,” he said. “Yesterday, a child was brought from Kherson in extremely serious condition. They are constantly being brought from Sumy, Kherson, Mykolaiv and other regions closer to the line of contact. I do not know whether it is right to say this, but we have gotten used to it.”
Doctors have had to save some of their youngest patients who were less than a year old. But Zhezhera said injuries to older children are especially painful to witness.
“Any childhood injury is terrible, but these children already understand what is happening to them,” he said. “They understand the future they face, so it is harder for them to adapt psychologically. They wonder where to find the strength to undergo treatment, recover and still want something in life. Children do not understand why there is such injustice, why the Russian Federation is killing them.”
Overnight into June 2, Russian forces launched a mass attack with ballistic missiles and drones on Kyiv and other regions of Ukraine. Residential buildings were damaged in many districts of the capital.
As of the evening of June 2, officials said seven people had been killed and about 90 wounded in Kyiv.
Witnesses said on social media that a woman and her two sons had been running to a shelter in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district when a strike landed nearby. The woman was killed at the scene, and the children were injured.
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